Of This and Other Worlds

Taking a walk on the first warm day of spring is like listening to God Himself preach a sermon on the Resurrection.

There's a cemetery near my house, and it's beautiful. Paved avenues winding up and down the hillside, shaded by pines that rise tall as cathedral spires. A mausoleum like a Greek temple. Fields of scrupulously trimmed grass, sprinkled with gravestones of every imaginable size and shape. Flowerbeds freshly turned, just waiting for the annuals that will bring them to kaleidoscopic life.

I took a walk through the cemetery and breathed in the fragrance of rain-washed earth and new grass. I listened to liquid silver birdsong, watched squirrels spiral up trees and down again, and walked carefully between the graves to visit a cluster of just-wakened snowdrops. The flat green surface of the river, sluggish after the long winter, was beginning to eddy into life. And down the long paved sweep of the cemetery hill, four teen boys were lugeing on their skateboards, full of youth and strength and the folly of spring. One of them fell off, swearing amiably, and rubbed his sore bottom as he tramped back up to the top of the hill to try it again.

My father is eighty-four years old, stooped and thin-haired and leaning on a walker. His leg bends backward at the knee and he has to wear a brace to support it; he has a tremor in his hands that the doctor says is just old age and nothing to worry about, but he cannot stop them shaking. He is largely deaf, and his hearing aids can only do so much, so he has cultivated the art of sitting quietly and with grace in a room full of conversation he cannot follow. He preaches with all the thoughtful wisdom of a life genuinely lived for God, and spends most of his days studying the Bible and talking about it with others—from the pulpit, on the telephone, in letters and e-mails and magazine articles.

As often as the weather and his own good health allow, my father walks through the same cemetery where I walked today. He has a plot there, unmarked but reserved for him and my mother whenever either of them should need it, and when he passes he hails it silently, like an old friend. And today, when I went to help him with a computer problem he was having, I found that he'd been writing up the wording he'd like to put on his gravestone.

"I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep [in death], lest you sorrow as others who have no hope," wrote the apostle Paul. He also wrote, "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

My father is in the autumn of his life, and he is not afraid of the winter. He is only waiting for the spring.

Today I was reading this passage in Leviticus 5, in which the Lord is instructing Moses on the various offerings and sacrifices to be made in the Tabernacle: ( A bit of Jewish theology )

And that reminded me of this passage in Luke 2: ( And a bit of Christian theology to go with it )

Excuse me, I just got a shiver down my spine.

Part One, in case you missed it

We do not sin in a vacuum, or for mere sinning's sake, but rather in response to natural human feelings and the pressures of circumstance: hunger, thirst, weariness, frustration, boredom, anger, loneliness, pain, sickness, discouragement, sexual urges, and so on. And when we seek sympathy and understanding from those who might otherwise condemn us, it is on that basis that we make our appeal. "I stole that money because I was hungry." "I hit that man because he made me furious." "I had that affair because I was so lonely." We want other people to understand the feelings that led to our giving in to temptation, to be able to imagine themselves in our place, so that they will be compassionate toward us and show us mercy.

If we think of it that way, then it is unnecessary to believe that Christ had to be capable of actually committing sin in order to sympathize with us. What we really want is to know that He understands how we feel before we give in to sin – that He knows what hunger, thirst, weariness, frustration, boredom, anger, loneliness, pain, sickness, discouragement, and sexual urges feel like because He has personally experienced them.*

Well, in the gospels we do find Christ coming under these kinds of overwhelming pressures, and being demonstrably affected by them. He was not some super-being immune to the frailties and vulnerabilities of humanity, but a true Son of Man. After forty days and nights in the wilderness, Matthew and Luke tell us, He was hungry (perhaps the most colossal understatement in all of Scripture: He must have been nearly dead of starvation). By the well in Samaria after a long day's walk, He was thirsty. After preaching long hours to the crowds in Galilee, He was weary – so weary in fact that He could sleep soundly in a boat tossed by a raging storm. In the temple courts, seeing His Father's house turned into a marketplace, He was consumed with anger. In Gethsemane, He was overwhelmed with loneliness and sorrow almost to the point of death. On Calvary, He experienced horrific physical, emotional and spiritual pain.

And yet, the author of Hebrews assures us, He went through all these ordeals "sin apart". He was tested and tempted in all the ways that make us weak and vulnerable and prone to sin, but He never stepped over the line. Sin found nothing in Him, no claim or hold on His spirit, because He was not only truly Man, but truly God. He never lost sight of the Father, or of the glories of heaven, and so none of the insipid, feeble pleasures of this sin-corrupted world could possibly beguile Him, any more than you or I would be tempted to covet rhinestones if we owned the Koh-I-Noor. All the tests and temptations He endured, potent and real as they were, served merely to demonstrate His incorruptible and divine character. As the same writer of Hebrews noted, "Such a high priest meets our need -- one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens."

But because as a Man Christ was tempted, in the sense of going through all the same feelings of need and experiences of hardship that we do, we can cry out to Him in any situation and know that He understands – not only how we feel, but what we need to endure and overcome. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. (1 Cor. 10:13)

I am thankful beyond words that whatever I feel, whatever I face, whatever pressures I am under, I have a Saviour who understands. He does not ignore or excuse sin -- rather, He died to save me from it. But He will never treat me unjustly or fail to hear my cries for help, either.

--
* Before anybody has hysterics over the implication that Christ was not asexual, I'd like to point out that the sexual impulses were given and blessed by God at the beginning of creation, and that they are in no way sinful in and of themselves. I suggest, therefore, that if the incarnate Christ was truly Man and not a eunuch, He would surely understand the feeling of sexual attraction, though He never indulged in lustful fantasies or committed any form of sexual sin.

Aha! Now I remember something interesting I wanted to post about. Months ago, Cheryl asked me in the comments of her blog:

What is your approach to Biblical interpretation? (I'm thinking mostly literal vs. nonliteral here, though I'm aware there are many more nuanced approaches and you have one of those. And feel free to direct me to a blog post on this, as I think you've probably written one on it...)

Well, as it happens, I didn't have a blog post written on it, so I had to file her question away for future reference, and now here I am, finally getting around to it (thanks for your patience, Cheryl!).

I do approach the Bible literally -- that is, I believe that it may be read and understood without a secret decoder ring or years of special education. This is not to say that a theological education has no value, but rather that I believe any person capable of reading, say, the average newspaper article should be capable of grasping the basic narratives and concepts of the Bible.

Of course there are difficult texts and passages which require thoughtful consideration before the reader can be at all confident of their meaning; and there are also parts which at first glance seem merely irrelevant or tedious and are hard to interpret in that sense. But I do not believe that the Bible is so packed with allegory, metaphor and figurative language that a reasonably intelligent child couldn't understand the gist of what it's trying to say. I believe that God gave us His Word in order to communicate, not obfuscate.

Note, however, that taking the Bible literally does not mean failing to recognize that it contains poetic language, parables, metaphors and the like. Jesus used all kinds of analogies and figures of speech in His teaching, for instance; and the writings of the Old Testament prophets are full of symbols and visionary language. However, it is generally quite clear in the context when a given passage is figurative or poetic in nature.

In that sense, I read the Bible as I would read any other book -- I begin by assuming that the author(s) of said book have a message that they wish to communicate to me, and that I will be able to understand that message if I read carefully. It may take me a long time -- even a whole lifetime -- to fully grasp everything that is being said, but that doesn't mean that I won't be able to understand any of it.

The problem with the view that the Bible merely "contains" truth or that it is primarily figurative in nature is that it postulates a God who plays favorites with the intelligensia. The more sophisticated a thinker you are, the better you are versed in ancient literature and languages and symbolic interpretation and so on, the more of the Bible you will understand; whereas a person without the same access to higher education and extra-biblical historical writings and so on will be left in the dark. However, Paul in his letter to the Corinthians explicitly stated that God does not give preferential treatment to the highly educated. His message is not merely for some, but for all.

As such, I believe that the Bible can indeed be profitably understood and put into practice by anyone who approaches it thoughtfully and humbly, even if they are not an accredited Biblical scholar; and that it is also possible for a highly intelligent and educated person to miss the interpretive boat, if they approach the text in a spirit of arrogance or with preconceived notions of what it will or should contain.

Mind you, the real difficulty most of us (and I include myself in this) have with the Bible is not that we read it and fail to comprehend what it is saying, but that we read it carelessly or not at all.

As part of a discussion in her LiveJournal, Kate Orman wanted to know why I believe it's important that the things the Bible -- and specifically, Jesus Himself -- says about Adam and Eve and the fall of humanity be literally, factually correct, and not merely figuratively or metaphorically true. Couldn't the first few chapters of Genesis be mythical rather than historical, designed to be appreciated by people less scientifically advanced than ourselves? And couldn't Jesus have been speaking to the crowds on that level?

At first glance, it sounds reasonable enough that even if Jesus was the Son of God and not merely a good human teacher, He might have chosen to accomodate the ignorance of his listeners, speaking in mythical terms that they would understand. After all, He told parables, didn't He?

There's a problem with this idea, however. If you look at the gospels, when Jesus used parables and metaphors, it's generally indicated in or obvious from the context that He is using figurative language. Phrases such as "I am the Door", for instance, would not have been understood literally by any of His hearers, and as He goes on to expound on the meaning of His statement it's clear that He's using a metaphor. Elsewhere it's even more obvious, with phrases like, "And He spoke to them in parables, saying..." and in some cases, as in the case of the parable of the sower, a full interpretation of the parable follows, with each symbolic element assigned its literal meaning.

There are no such indicators, however, when Jesus speaks to the Pharisees about divorce and invokes the example of Adam and Eve. He's not merely using Adam and Eve as metaphors, here: He's arguing that because God literally created a literal man and a literal woman and gave them to each other in a literal first marriage, therefore once a man and woman have been joined in marriage, God means them to belong exclusively to one another and to take their relationship seriously. And in the process of making this argument, Jesus quotes directly from Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, treating both chapters as historical and authoritative accounts of what God actually said and did at the beginning of creation.

If in this passage Jesus were merely making reference to Genesis as a shared myth with no basis in literal historical fact, then wouldn't actually be proving anything, any more than I would be proving something if I said, "The story of Snow White proves that eating apples is dangerous, and therefore you ought not to eat apples." Of course, one might say, the Pharisees were part of a scientifically ignorant culture and didn't know that the story of Adam and Eve wasn't literally true, so it was okay for Jesus to use the myth in this way to convince them. But that puts Jesus in the position of exploiting the Pharisees' scientific ignorance and using a false argument to persuade them. And it also makes His words irrelevant to us today, because if God did not actually create Adam and Eve as distinct male and female human beings whose union generated the rest of the human race, then the whole basis for Jesus's "one man/one woman/marriage is sacred" argument collapses.

But there's an even more serious problem, involving not just this one passage but indeed the whole message of the Bible from beginning to end. What the Bible tells us, beginning with Genesis and carrying straight through to the end of Revelation, is that sin is a real and terrible problem in the heart of humankind, and that since the events of Genesis 3 all creation has been "groaning" on account of it. In other words, the Bible insists that at some definite, historical point in the past, mankind made a conscious, willful decision to rebel against God and His commandment, thus bringing about the moral corruption of humanity, the inevitability of physical death, and all the disastrous faults we see in the world around us. This is why humanity needed sacrifices for sin (a practice we see beginning with Cain and Abel) and ultimately, a divine, infinite, perfect Redeemer to pay sin's penalty and offer us salvation.

However, if there was no Eden, no Adam and Eve, and no literal space-time fall, there is no such thing as sin -- only faulty creation on God's part. We are left to conclude that somehow God neglected to build into the process of evolution a safeguard to keep it from going wrong, leaving man and nature mere victims of a faulty evolutionary process, and a careless or short-sighted or indifferent God the real author of the phenomenon we call sin. In which case the whole idea of God sending a Redeemer in the form of His Son Jesus Christ is sheer mockery -- God trying to cover up His own mistakes and pin the blame on us.

But the Bible tells us very firmly that God did not make creation as we see it today: rather, He created it "good" and it was only corrupted after humanity fell. Both the Old and New Testaments repeatedly assert that God is not the author of sin; rather, He is completely opposed to and set apart from sin, and it is antithetical to His very nature. At the same time, the Bible insists, we human beings are far from being victims of chance or evolution -- rather, we are all directly and materially responsible for our own moral and spiritual choices, and answerable to a holy God.

Neither the divine righteousness nor the human moral responsibility described in the Bible are possible, however, unless there was at some point a literal commandment that a literal Adam and Eve literally chose to violate, and therefore a literal space-time fall in a literal Eden. Otherwise, the whole concept of "sin" is meaningless. We can't talk about morality, only about the way things have evolved to be -- and as such we have no basis on which to judge any creature's behavior as good or evil, right or wrong, because all of us are nothing more than soft machines programmed by our biology, with no reason to resist any of our biological impulses.

My personal conviction is that the story of Adam and Eve as the father and mother of all human beings, and the Fall as the origin of sin and as the reason for man's estrangement from God, may well be powerful in a mythic or symbolic sense, but in the Biblical context it has no meaning unless it actually happened. Without that element of factuality, the whole Biblical narrative of sin and redemption falls apart. Indeed, without that historical narrative and its climax in the literal death and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Bible itself would tell us that there is no hope, no meaning, and no value in the Christian faith for anyone, and that Christians are to be "pitied above all men".

NOTE: For anyone interested in a more cogent and thorough examination of these ideas, my brother Stephen L. Anderson has written an article entitled "Can Myth Save the Miraculous?" to be published in a forthcoming issue of Philosophy Now. Recommended.

Just got back from speaking to a group of women at our church's monthly "Coffee Hour". I've done this a couple of times before, but always in the dead of winter when the weather was terrible and hardly anybody made it out. Today, though, the weather is gorgeous, and quite a lot of people showed up.

I tend to feel awfully presumptuous speaking to a group like this -- especially since I'm by far the youngest person in the room. And in spite of being thirty-two years old and a mother, I still feel like an eighteen-year-old. Even when I look in the mirror, I don't see a woman there, I see a girl. However, certainly none of my (mostly elderly) audience seemed to think it odd or inappropriate that I was the speaker. I imagine it would be hard for them to credit if I were just up there purporting to give them advice from my personal life experience, but since I'm talking about what the Bible has to say instead of blathering on about what I think, it's different.

Anyway, if you're even remotely interested, my subject was "Finding Freedom" and you can find the outline for the message here.